


let the cold in

by renaissance



Series: R/S 24-Hour Challenge [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, First Meetings, Gen, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 15:48:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13298136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/pseuds/renaissance
Summary: On small scales, glitter is a reasonable facsimile for snow.





	let the cold in

**Author's Note:**

> for the R/S 24 Hour Challenge, pommedeplume's prompt, "winter moods" featuring any of the following concepts: spilled glitter, a dusty bookshelf, a locked box, a mutual interest, an unexpected guest. i didn't include all of them but i think you'll pick up on a few! it's been 40+ celsius here today, so writing about winter was a fun diversion from the heat :)
> 
> this is some kind of "modern with magic" au but the rest is up to your interpretation. idk what i was going for to be honest but sometimes you just have to go with the flow, and i think it worked out alright in the end... !

Someone was knocking at the shop front.

The place was pretty obviously closed. Sirius had rolled out the shutters and he’d even sticky-taped a sign to it: _Closed until it stops snowing_. No mechanic could work in weather like this. Maybe the sign had been blown away, or it had got so wet it was illegible. Sirius couldn’t imagine anyone being out walking in this weather, either.

Whoever was out there wasn’t about to give up. They knocked louder, the echo of it reverberating all down the corrugated steel shutters. Sirius turned the telly up to match.

“I know you’re in there!”

Sirius would have to deal with this, wouldn’t he? He leant back in his wooden chair and shouted over his shoulder, “We’re closed!”

There was a pause, and then, “What?”

“Oh, for—” Sirius got up and crossed his obstacle course of a shop floor to the shutters, so the person outside could hear him. “We’re closed. Come back tomorrow.”

“Please,” the person said. “I can’t come to you during normal business hours.”

Eleven in the morning on a Tuesday was about as normal a business hour as you could get—which meant this person was here for Sirius’ other business, and didn’t seem to have got the message that he wasn’t taking on clients anymore. But for someone to come on a day like today… Sirius had to admit it, a case like this would always catch his interest.

“Fine. I’m going to open the shutters, and I need to you to get in as soon as possible so I don’t get snow all over the place.”

It was a futile request. No sooner had the shutters creaked off the floor than the elements followed, a light dusting of snow carpeting the entrance. It occurred to Sirius he could have avoided all of this by telling the client about the entrance around the back, but he didn’t fancy bringing a total stranger in through the parts of the house he lived in. A bit of water for his continued privacy and mystique—it was a fair trade-off.

The shutters were shoulder height before the client stepped in. He was a tall man of around Sirius’ age, dressed too lightly in an outfit that looked like it had been stolen off five different clotheslines, and drenched from his greying hair to his sensible gumboots. He was carrying a parcel beneath his oversized coat; it was probably a lost cause. He looked around at all the snow that was getting in and winced. “Sorry about this; I’ve got a bad back.”

“Not a problem.” Sirius squared his shoulders and pretended he really didn’t mind. As he reversed the shutters, he saw that the snow had got on some of the bikes, too.

“I really do feel bad about imposing on you,” the man said, shaking water from his hair. “Sirius Black, isn’t it? My name’s Remus.”

“Alright, Remus, here’s the deal,” Sirius said. “I haven’t done this in a while, but I gather you’re desperate, so I’m going to make an exception. These are my terms: I’m available for one night only, so choose wisely. And no PDA. I can play a couple of different characters: the loveable rake, the charmless bore, the dissolute drunkard—”

“Excuse me for being blunt,” Remus interrupted, “but what the fuck are you talking about?”

“You’re not here for my Fake Boyfriend to Piss Off Your Family service?”

Remus laughed awkwardly. “No, but I’ll keep that in mind. I’m here on recommendation from a friend of yours, James Potter. I’ve heard that you fix things.”

“Why didn’t you open with that? I’d have let you in right away if you’d said James sent you,” Sirius said, frustrated.

“I thought he would have told you.”

“James tells me nothing,” Sirius said. “Look, can we forget about the Fake Boyfriend thing? I don’t actually do that anymore. It’s—a long story.”

“If you say so.” Remus took the parcel out from under his coat. He held it almost tenderly; his fingers were long and elegant and his hands were covered in cuts and bruises. “Do you have somewhere we can sit so I can show you… ?”

Sirius was bruised too, all down his arms and legs from dropping tools while he worked on the bikes, and he’d scraped and grazed himself more times than he could count. There was something different about Remus’ injuries, though. The scars were deeper. And this was a friend of James’. Keeping a client to the main shop didn’t seem half so important anymore.

“I think my office upstairs would be best. Try not to touch anything.”

Remus would be dripping a trail of water across the shop floor. Sirius tried not to think about it, leading the way. He switched off the telly as he passed his desk, and behind that took the staircase up to his flat.

“You live here?”

Sirius could tell Remus was looking at the clothes hanging off the banister. “Don’t sound so shocked. Everyone has to live somewhere.”

He bypassed his bedroom—an even greater mire of dirty clothes—and went through to the living room-dining room-kitchen-workshop. His office. It overlooked the street; Sirius had spent the whole morning downstairs that he hadn’t seen quite how bad the snow had become. The low buildings had grown several inches, but down by the road the snow turned to slush, dented with the odd trail of footprints and lining the pavements with brown ice.

Remus hung back by the entrance. “At least you have central heating.”

“Want a towel?” Sirius said. “I can lend you some clothes too. ‘Fraid I don’t have anything that matches the eccentric professor look.”

“I’m willing to try something new.”

He found Remus his least-ripped pair of jeans and a loose shirt; the shirt was fine, but the jeans were too short, and Sirius made straight for the table so that he didn’t have to look at Remus’ skinny, bruised ankles.

They sat at the dining table—nicked from the family home and doing double duty as a workbench. Sirius swept his arm across the wooden surface to clear a space, knocking over old spare parts and a pot of glitter. At Remus’ inquisitive look, half-open mouth, Sirius said, “It’s for snowglobes. I sell them on Etsy.”

“That’s four jobs I’ve counted so far,” Remus said. “Anything else?”

“I used to be a model.”

“Of course. Why did you stop?”

“They didn’t let me get my hands dirty,” Sirius said. “So what am I fixing?”

Remus placed the parcel in the middle of the workbench, beside the drift of glitter. Inside all of the plastic and bubble wrap was a small wooden box. Its panels were bevelled with the same repeated design, a sort of stylised flower, and there was, as far as Sirius could see, no way to open it.

“Where’d you get this?” he asked.

“Found it while I was cleaning out my parents’ old house,” Remus said. “At first I thought it was one of those magic boxes, you know, you slide it a certain way and different compartments open up. But I’ve tried everything, and none of the panels move. I need to know what’s inside it.”

Sirius tapped it—hollow, easily room enough for something the side of a stick of butter. He ran his finger along the seam between two of the panels, trying to feel for some vulnerability.

Remus was leaning forward, watching Sirius closely as he worked. “Do you think you can open it?”

“Depends. I don’t want to break it.”

“How is it you fix things?” Remus pressed. “James was vague on the details.”

Sirius looked up at him. “Do you believe in magic?”

“Some kinds. Not the whole wands and spells and fairy dust deal.”

“Fairy dust, I can do.” Sirius dipped his finger in the spilt glitter and went back to tracing lines on the box. “I’m sure I could wave a wand around and it’d have the same effect, but I’ve always found it easiest to do these things by hand.”

He held the box in his hands and felt for its structure. He could never describe this part of the process to anyone—it was entirely intuitive, the way he examined the inner workings of the most complicated of systems with only his fingertips. This was why he was a fixer. If anyone asked he would tell them, “I’m just good with my hands.”

“The kind of magic I believe in,” Remus said, “is the kind that transforms. The magic that takes something old and remakes it anew, however many times it takes.”

This box felt different to anything Sirius had worked with before. The lock had no keyholes or latches, and it eschewed the geometrical legerdemain of the usual magic box. This was _real_ magic.

“Deep,” Sirius said.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Noted.” Sirius put the box down. “Well, you were right, after a fashion. It is a magic box, and I have an idea of how it works.”

“Can you open it?”

“It’s—there’s some sort of spell, or enchantment on it, I guess. I’m not used to this sort of thing, but I know that it needs two people to open it.”

“What do I need to do?” Remus asked. The magic didn’t seem to bother him; that, in itself, Sirius found utterly bewitching.

But Sirius was stumped. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe we need more fairy dust.”

“I really don’t think that’s—”

Sirius stuck his entire hand into the glitter and rubbed it around so that his palm and fingers were absolutely covered. “Shake on it?”

“Is this some kind of ritual?” Remus said. “Like a bonding thing that increases the potency of the magic?”

“Sure,” Sirius said.

Remus took his hand with a surprisingly firm grip. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

Two sets of hands working as one, they started at the top, trying to push the panels of the box aside. They managed it on their fifth try—one of the smallest panels budged aside to reveal a shifting series of drawers. Each hidden compartment of the box was, without exception, empty.

Outside, the snow continued to fall, frosting over Sirius’ window.

“I don’t know whether or not I’m disappointed,” Remus said. “I came out in the storm for this…”

“At least now you know that it does open.” Remus still looked disheartened, so Sirius said, “Why today? Was it a matter of urgency?”

Remus averted his gaze, almost embarrassed. “James said you’d be closed for the snow, so it felt like now or never. But I shouldn’t have come out today at all.”

“You can stay the night,” Sirius said.

He wasn’t sure where it came from. Maybe it was Remus sitting there wearing Sirius’ clothes, or maybe it was the number of times their fingers had brushed while they worked to open the box, and the glitter that now tracked across the back of both of their hands. Maybe it was that this had been ultimately pointless, but he so badly wanted it to have some kind of meaning.

“I can’t,” Remus said. “I need to… go somewhere else. Do some other kind of magic.” He dipped a finger in the glitter and traced a circle on the table. “I hope you understand.”

“Transformative magic,” Sirius said. “Right.”

Remus filled in the circle with a pinch of glitter. Then, angrily, he swiped a finger through his creation, scattering it meaninglessly. “Maybe some other time.”

“Can I get your number?”

“Don’t have a phone.”

“Oh.” Sirius felt a little lost; he seized on the one thing he was trying not to fixate on. “Well, you’ll have to come back to return my clothes, so…”

In the end, Sirius lent Remus a raincoat too, his biggest and warmest. It was fine—his fridge was full enough for the next couple of days, and if the weather forecasts were to be trusted, the worst of the snow would be over by then. He took Remus out to the back exit, this time.

“Thanks again,” Remus said. “I spoke out of turn earlier. I don’t think it was a bad idea, coming here today.”

Self-conscious, Sirius ran a hand through his hair, a bad habit he’d picked up from James. It was only after that he remembered his hands were covered in glitter, and now his hair was wet from the snow, too. “Promise me you’ll be back?” he said. He sounded as pathetic as he looked.

“Of course. I’ll keep you if I ever need a boyfr—I mean, someone to pretend to be my—oh, you know.”

“I don’t do that anymore,” Sirius said, “or at least, I don’t pretend. Listen, Remus, keep the clothes. But come by whenever you can. Doesn’t matter if I’m working.”

“Doesn’t matter if I come by when you’re working,” Remus countered, “if I don’t have anything magical that needs fixing.”

He gave Sirius one last smile before turning to leave, head down against the bracing wind. Sirius stood on the back stoop, snow blowing indoors through the open door behind him, and watched Remus until the snow outside was too heavy to make out his figure in the distance.


End file.
